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“They have female external genitalia, a blind vagina, and no uterus.”
“His skin became very thick and formed loose spines that were sloughed off at intervals. When he grew up, this “porcupine man” married and had six sons, all of whom had this condition, and several daughters, all of whom were normal.”
PRINCIPLES OF GENETIC ANALYSIS Richard Lewontin, David Suzuki, et al
Cute cover with a cheesy computer graphic of fruitflies with DNA and pedigrees. Glossy pages, and the text is set in a rather stuffy Garamond-looking font. There are plenty of pictures, but you need to poke around for the really cool ones. Don’t buy this textbook if you, like me, just wanted to learn how to genetically engineer mutant human beings; this book won’t tell you the answer. But there is a silver lining. Skip the rest of the book and only look at chapters 2 and 3 for fascinating pictures of genetic disorders, like the pictures of people with six fingers and the men born with female genitalia and all that. Those chapters alone save the book, moving it from a measly 1.5 to a more respectable 2.5 on our scale.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars.